Back to looking for fireworks, in 2013

My utterly fictitious and sloppily forged "absent" notes in middle school were more believable than this:

Although Mitt Romney was supposed to visit Orlando on Monday, the campaign announced late Sunday that the presumed Republican presidential nominee was too exhausted to make the trip.

Evidently the malodorous blowback of Romney's veep pick is just now hitting his nostrils.

It's stunning. It is indescribably stunning. After Andrea Saul's epic stumble last week, I suspected that Romney would quickly recalculate and reconsider Ryan, but I never believed he'd actually take the plunge. That he did, however, reconfigures not merely the presidential campaign, but the GOP's future. The Republican Party is now officially the party of Medicare's annihilation and Social Security's privatization; it has firmly grabbed hold of the powerfully electrified third rails of American politics; and it will, if the Dems play their cards right, emerge--barely--as a smoldering, charred shell of a party in 2013.

This may seem like a contradiction, but that is not to predict that the GOP will experience a November collapse. The odds of a Republican House and Senate gains remain, I should think, roughly intact. The wheels of demolition often grind slowly in American politics. But the countdown to detonation has begun. The GOP has finally maxed out its ideological madness. It can, simply put, morph no crazier than it already is. Which is to say, it can no longer march forward. It can only retreat. And it must do so with a demographically dying base.

Following Romney's crushing defeat, the firebreathers will of course blame Mitt Romney: he was never conservative enough, he wasn't vicious enough, he wasn't inspiring enough, he wasn't, let's say, Santorum enough, and so on. But every sober strategic breath will be whispering: We need to make another plan--now.

Then the fireworks will really begin. Or so I suspect.

Comments

[Bruce]

Worth noting as well that the Romney-Ryan Wisconsin appearance yesterday was in Republican stronghold Waukesha and NOT Ryan's home district.

[Robert Lipscomb]

Once again, you are much too severe in your criticisms. Can you not allow a modicum of sympathy and forgiveness?

Who among us has not played that familiar Sunday morning scene; the look of of horror and disgust to learn the person with whom you thought you were going to bed is not the person with whom you awoke? I can tell you from personal experience that look hurts like hell.

It scars the soul. Is there no balm in Gilead for Ryan?

Sure, Saturday was fun, but Mitt simply cannot bring Paul home to meet the folks down in Florida. Of course, there is that little problem. As we say in The South, Paul "is a little bit pregnant" with a plan.

Mitt is no cad. Even as the party was peaking this weekend, Mitt was quite candid that he would not "embrace Ryan's plan". I am sure that Mitt will do the right thing by Paul. You know, pay to let him spend a few months with relatives in the Red States until - well, you know.

Of course, literature is full of stories about the revenge of bastard sons of the king.

[Turgidson]

I still think you're way too optimistic in your predictions that the GOP is approaching its reckoning.

If the GWB years and the smoldering ruin it wrought, both in massive real-world suffering and two political blowouts for his party, didn't convince them to moderate (QUITE the opposite, in fact), why would a solid but non-landslide loss to Obama do it?

One thing I've learned in the past few years in particular is that the GOP can always always always sink lower than I thought possible and/or become crazier than I thought possible.

[Turgidson]

I'll also add: all indications are that those within the party's apparatus who might advocate for a sensible shift to the political middle are either sidelined, muzzled, or have already been drummed out.

I mean for f's sake, John Boehner is considered one of their squishy moderates now. John. Boehner.

[NickT]

Can the GOP find as many as four "sober, strategic breaths" in the entire country?

[majii]

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can do these things. Among them are a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1952

I've noticed that many republicans don't know our nation's history and seem to think studying history is "not important." President Eisenhower, a member of their own party, warned about what c/would happen to any political party that attempted to destroy Social Security, but republicans are willfully ignoring his warning. They have also ignored Eisenhower's warning about the danger of the military-industrial complex. Of course I must acknowledge that Eisenhower wouldn't be welcome in today's Republican Party.

[japa21]

I have said before that I am more optimistic about the Dems retaking the House and keeping the Senate. And I am even more so now. More than ever before, Ryan's plan will come under general scrutiny. It won't be a one or two day story and then forgotten.

And all indications are that it won't just be presented as the Ryan plan or even the Romney/Ryan plan. No, it will be presented as the Romney/Ryan/Republican plan.

Virtually every incumbent Republican member of the House voted not once, but twice for this proposed budget. Any Dem candidate that does not take advantage of that should be sued for political malpractice.

[Infidel753]

Eisenhower, quoted above: "Their number is negligible and they are stupid."

Well, today he would be half wrong. Their number is no loner negligible.